Eurasia Press & News
Croatia and Bosnia say the expulsion of hundreds of migrants and refugees from the first to the second country are regulated by a bilateral agreement – but NGOs, rights groups and a legal expert question its legality.
Since the end of March 2023, hundreds of migrants and refugees have been returned from Croatia back to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Differently from the illegal pushbacks that saw thousands of people being violently sent back from Croatia to Bosnia between 2018 and 2022, these recent operations are happening with cooperation between the two countries and with the open approval of European institutions.
NGOs and rights groups were the first to condemn this new phenomenon, referring to it as “mass expulsions” implemented by Croatia. With information gathered by direct testimonies and documents collected from the expelled people, they have voiced concerns regarding alleged degrading treatments and human rights violations by Croatian police.
Besides such abuses, experts also say the procedure could be illegal. “There are some doubts over the legality of what we are seeing happening between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in terms of European law,” Italian jurist and migration expert Gianfranco Schiavone told BIRN.
Not allowed to seek asylum
A few weeks after the first migrants and refugees were returned to Bosnia’s northwest Una-Sana Canton, Mustafa Ruznic, the canton’s Prime Minister, sent an open letter to Bosnia’s state security and foreign ministers, as well as to the head of the Foreigners Affairs Service, SPS, demanding an explanation for the increased number of migrants and refugees reportedly returned from Croatia to Bosnia based on a bilateral readmission agreement.
Ruznic said a significant number of them were unknown to the authorities and might present security risks, and complained of not being informed about the ongoing construction of a detention centre in the Lipa Temporary Reception Centre, situated in the Canton’s administrative centre, Bihac.
Croatian and Bosnian authorities later explained that the mass returns were taking place on the basis of a bilateral agreement between the two states signed in 2002 and annexed again in September 2011 with a specific plan for its implementation, but never actually put into use.
Nenad Nesic, Bosnia’s Minister of Security, denied a new possible crisis in Bosnia’s parliament on April 19, a day after he met Ruznic in Bihac.
Presenting data for the first three months of 2023, he stated that a total of 768 foreign citizens had been accepted back under the Readmission Agreement between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.
He added that, during the same period, 1,816 requests for the admission of foreigners under readmission were rejected because Croatian authorities couldn’t prove they came from Bosnia.
“This clearly shows that our Foreigners Service is responsibly doing its job and there is no influx of migrants into Bosnia and Herzegovina. Migrants are evenly distributed and currently most of them are in the Sarajevo Canton, where 630 migrants are accommodated,” Nesic stated.
Sara Kekus, from the Zagreb-based Center for Peace Studies, CMS, who has been monitoring the situation with migrants, told BIRN that they do not have specific data on readmissions, but that the number is clearly increasing.
“According to the testimonies of our associates, organisations, volunteers, and activists who are present in BiH, the persons returned from Croatia testified that they tried to seek asylum [there], but they were not allowed to do so, or they did not even know who to ask for asylum,” Kekus said.
According to Kekus, people reported not having access to translators and that they were issued documents mostly in Croatian, which they signed without knowing what they were signing.
“Complaints are that persons were kept in detention for several days and that the meals were rather meagre, one a day, bread and cheese and water,” he said.
Among the expelled people, Kekus notes, there were not only adults but also unaccompanied children and families with small children, which is “especially problematic”.
The Border Violence Monitoring Network, a grassroot watchdog network of NGOs and rights groups, collected testimonies from people subjected to the pushbacks and denounced the lack of translations and the fact that the internationally guaranteed right to ask for asylum was not respected by the Croatian authorities.
“The police there [in Croatia] asked us to pay for accommodation, food and transport to the border, as if we were in a hotel and not in a prison. We didn’t ask to be taken there. We feel as if we were robbed,” one of the men expelled from Croatia told them. Documents collected by BVMN support this last claim.
In a written response to BIRN’s inquiry, the Croatian Ministry of Interior, MUP, said that “the BVMN report is not based on information about actual treatment”.
It said that “every illegal migrant caught by the Croatian police has the right and is adequately informed about the possibility of expressing an intention to seek international protection. If he/she expresses such an intention, an appropriate procedure is initiated.”
Expulsions or ‘returns’?
In the same letter, the Croatian MUP stated that implementation of the bilateral agreement had been discussed at several meetings prior to this, and that at the Joint EU-BiH Readmission Committee meeting on March 28 in Brussels, the European Commission reminded Bosnia’s authorities of their obligation to implement the agreement.
The MUP also said these procedures cannot be called expulsions, but are instead returns of persons as regulated by the bilateral agreement.
Italian jurist and migration expert Gianfranco Schiavone has a different opinion. “This type of procedure needs to be verified carefully because the notion of readmission applies currently in light of a directive, 115 of 2008, that regulates readmissions, but only among member countries of the European Union.”
That is not the case for the two countries in question. Croatia is a European Union member since 2015, and it joined the visa-free Schengen zone at the start of 2023. Bosnia, on the other hand, has only recently been granted the status of EU candidate country.
“This is de facto an expulsion of an alien citizen who irregularly arrived in a European country and should happen under the guarantee of the same European directive,” stated Schiavone.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch published a report on May 3, saying “Croatian police regularly and often violently push back refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants to Bosnia and Herzegovina without assessing their asylum requests or protection needs”. The 94-page report, titled “‘Like We Were Just Animals’: Pushbacks of People Seeking Protection from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina,” finds that Croatian authorities engage in pushbacks, including of unaccompanied children and families with young children.
“The practice is ongoing despite official denials, purported monitoring efforts, and repeated – and unfulfilled – commitments to respect the right to seek asylum and other human rights norms. Border police frequently steal or destroy phones, money, identity documents, and other personal property, and often subject children and adults to humiliating and degrading treatment, sometimes in ways that are explicitly racist,” the report says.
“Pushbacks have long been standard operating procedure for Croatia’s border police, and the Croatian government has bamboozled European Union institutions through deflection and empty promises,” said Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior children’s rights counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of the report. “These abhorrent abuses – and the official duplicity that facilitates them – should end.”
Croatian authorities have mostly disclaimed responsibility for pushbacks, and the Croatian Ministry of the Interior did not respond to Human Rights Watch’s requests for a meeting or for comment on its findings, it says in the report.
